ejobs Applicant Tracking System

Client

ejobs

Capabilities

UX Research, UX design, UI design

Tools

Figma, Coggle, Paper prototyping

Timeline

5 months, 2016

ejobs.ro is Romania’s largest job board with over 3.3 mil users. Their Applicant Tracking System is used daily by thousands of companies to post job ads, search candidates and manage hiring pipelines. Because the app was built fast and loose, as it often happens in start-up environments, it accumulated a lot of UX debt.

Maintaining the code base required a lot of effort to the point where it was impractical. The company decided to refactor it’s code using Symphony. We took this opportunity to also improve the product by fixing some of the know issues and adding new features that would make the product more competitive. This was a challenging project due to it’s size and impact. Let’s dive into the process.

Defining the concept

A project of this scaled needed a proper design process in which everyone was involved. We started with a series of meetings where I would work with the CEO, CTO, PM and heads of other departments to identify the problems we want to solve and come up with solutions. We organized all our ideas in a mindmap, using coggle.it.

Validation & focus groups

Next, to validate our ideas and give us a chance to identify new problems, we organized 4 focus group where aprox. 20 of our customers participated. This was also a great opportunity for me to interact with them face to face and start defining user personas based on real research. The focus groups helped us to better understand the daily routine of recruiters and how ejobs fits into their workflow, what types of customers we have, and what are their major pain points. This validated most of our assumptions and gave us confidence that the system we designed.

Wireframing solutions

After validating that our concept is pushing the product in the right direction, we explored different UI solutions. We used Figma share view access to the project file and the prototype, and keep everyone in the loop. I’ll detail below a few interesting problems we considered and the solutions I came up with.

Flexible candidate search

The previous system had a folder-like structure for organizing candidates, based on hiring pipelines. This was too limiting for the needs of the modern recruiter. We came up with a Pinterest-style search that allow recruiters to apply criteria as tags. Viewing candidates of a pipeline simply applies the appropriate filters. This helps recruiters quickly create complex queries to see candidates in multiple pipelines, locations, skill categories, etc.

Another issue we identified during our focus groups, was that recruiters have very different preferences regarding the information they’re looking for when screening candidates. There was no common-ground we could identify. To accommodate this, we introduced a customizable table where users can select what columns they want to see.

Easy hiring pipelines

Hiring can be a messy process and it’s hard to keep track who is in which stage of the process. Also, hiring processes can get very complex. To help recruiters have a birds-eye view, I designed a kan-ban view for hiring pipelines. This way, recruiters can define the steps and easily move candidates through the process.

Frictionless candidate screening

Our research revealed that recruiters screen tens or hundreds of resumes in one sitting. In the old app, this caused a lot of friction because the resume would load in a new page and you’d quickly loose track of where you left off in the list. I solved this problem by using a drawer to display the candidate profile and offer a few basic controls the recruiters needed. This solution also worked regardless of the viewing method – table or kan-ban.

Handling communications

Recruiters would often bounce between the ATS and email to communicate with the candidate when scheduling interviews. This was cumbersome and inefficient. We developed a Calendar section where recruiters can easily book an interview and see at a glance their entire schedule.

Faster job posting

Our customer support department revealed that recruiters often post the same job repeatedly over time, with small variations. However, because the titles where often the same, it was hard to identify which job ad you want to duplicate. This would sometimes force the user to leave the job posting flow to identify the job they want to duplicate. To solve this problem I designed a drawer that shows a searchable list of all previous job posts and a preview of the selected one. This made it easier for recruiters to find what they need and publish a new job in a fraction of the time.